Plastic materials are used in the constructions of many different commercial products. The manufacturers of such products typically purchase plastic materials in the form of small pellets. The manufacturers heat the pellets to form a plastic melt, and then mold the parts of their products from the melt using any one of a variety of different conventional molding processes.
Some manufacturers produce plastic products that require additional strength than that provided by producing the products from plastic pellets alone. These manufacturers often use plastic pellets that have been reinforced by structures embedded inside the plastic pellets for manufacturing their products. For example, plastic pellets are produced with small lengths of fibers, for example glass fibers or carbon fibers inside the pellets. The fibers in the pellets reinforce the pellets and provide additional strength to the pellets than that provided by plastic pellets alone.
In the manufacture of plastic pellets reinforced with fibers, long lengths of the fibers are typically stored at the manufacturing facility on spools. A length of fiber from each of the spools is pulled from the spool into and through a die. The die could have one interior chamber and a single fiber could be pulled through the one interior chamber. The die could have a plurality of interior chambers and a fiber could be pulled through each of the plurality of interior chambers.
An extruder communicates with the one or more interior chambers of the die and the lengths of fiber(s) pulled through the interior chambers. The extruder extrudes plastic melt into the die where the plastic melt coats the fibers being pulled through the die. The length of fibers, now coated with the plastic melt are pulled from the die and the plastic coating the fibers is allowed to cool.
The lengths of fibers with the now cooled plastic coating are pulled into a pelletizer where the lengths of fibers and their plastic coating are cut into pellets. Reinforced pellets produced in this manner can have a variety of sizes and are typically very small, for example the size of a drug capsule.
To increase the fiber reinforced pellet manufacturing capacity of an extrusion apparatus such as that described above, it would be necessary to increase the number of spools of fibers and the number of lengths of fibers pulled into the die. However, the spools of fibers are typically very large. The size of the spools prevents them from being positioned in close proximity to the die and the spools must be positioned some distance from the die. As the lengths of fibers on the spools are pulled from the spools and toward the die the fibers can become entangled or can be damaged in some way before they enter the die. Entanglement of the multiple lengths of fibers would require a shut down of the extrusion apparatus until the multiple lengths of fibers are untangled. Additionally, damage occurring to any of the multiple lengths of fibers prior to the lengths of fibers entering the die can result in plastic pellets being produced containing damaged portions of fibers which would result in less than the desired strength of the commercial product produced from the pellets.